In EU terms, it was just another failed euro-summit in all but name.
As jamborees go, it’s pretty up-market is Davos, but if you went there for solutions to the economic problems besetting the West you might as well have signed up for yodelling lessons instead. In EU terms, it was just another failed euro-summit in all but name, although Cameron took the opportunity to bash the bureaucrats with the sheer silliness of their recent recession-inducing measures on employment, tax and trade.
The euro-elite are only looking at saving the euro, but it is the job-destroying, growth-stifling, deflationary eurozone that is the problem. As Boris Johnson, that noted economist and bicyclist, said: “They are saving the disease and killing the patient!”
And if he can see it and say it in one sentence, without falling off his bike, why can’t they? Because their euro-project is so important, with so much political capital invested in it, that they cannot dare to see their little baby snuffed out. So they go around, ridiculously, claiming that they are preventing WW3 from breaking out, but at the rate they are going they are more likely to start it!
The euro-reality is now starkly obvious, namely that the eurozone now requires constant transfers from the north to the south, and increasingly so ad infinitum, but the northern core (read Germany) is not prepared to do this. If they don’t want to pay the cost of the eurozone, then it cannot continue. Simples, it’s basic meerkats.com. Some of us are sympathetic to Germany’s position, but we said loudly the euro wouldn’t work at the time of Maastricht, so don’t blame us.
The damage they are inflicting on the electorate and future generations has been laid bare by the recent EU unemployment figures, which are truly dreadful, appalling even, and certainly unsustainable both economically and socially. Take the figures for the under-25s: average unemployment is 22.4%, which is where the UK also stands. In Spain, which tops the charts, it is 52.4%!
In Spain, young people are heading for the exit just to get a job. In 20 years’ time, today’s over-45s will not have enough of their own age now to pay their pensions, or the hospitals and social services. The eurozone, in which every country is now in declining GDP if not recession, is a deflationary disaster for which there is only one answer: abandon the euro before it capsizes and tips all who sail in her into the briny – just like the Costa Concordia, it has sailed straight onto the rocks!
In the meantime, there is no other answer on how to save the eurozone on offer, either BC or AD, Before Cannes or After Davos. Lord Wolfson’s £250,000 prize for a viable solution is still safe in his bank account. Unemployment will keep on climbing as Merkozy keeps on forcing more austerity – from the ancient Greek a-ustos, meaning without wine – down the throats of the parched ones until there is nothing left to close down or force down.
At some point, civil disobedience and social anarchy will become the only option left for the dispossessed ones, Los Indignados, as Brussels enacts new legislation to suspend democracy in any country in trouble with its euro debts, as has happened by silent decree and backstabbing and mugging of old men in broad daylight in Greece and Italy.
The damage being done in the name of the euro makes the Blitzkrieg look like a good idea, which at least led, somewhat indirectly, to eventual reconstruction and recovery, a salvation of sorts that is not matched by today’s euro-austerity.
And all this done in the name of those who hold Europe dear and cursed the euro-sceptics for telling anyone who would listen how it was bound to end up! Ah, well, those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make into mad, barking europhiles, foaming at the mouth with single currencyitis! Thank goodness the British had the sense – but only just! – to ban such rabid nonsense and follow the euro-sceptics, now indisputably known as the euro-realists.